Ubisoft Massive have made it pretty clear that with their upcoming open world game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, they’re looking to leverage the hardware of the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S to deliver an incredibly immersive experience, and that given the things they’re trying to accomplish, they couldn’t have made the game work on the PS4 and Xbox One. One of the things that the game is going to do on a visual level is dedicate itself to ray tracing completely.
Speaking with German site Gamestar, technical director of programming Nikolay Stefanov said that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is essentially going to make ray tracing compulsory, in that on each platform the game is playable on, it will always have ray tracing on. “Avatar will be a title that will only appear with ray tracing,” Stefanov said, before adding that the developers are also taking measures to ensure that the quality and performance of the game are “scalable” depending on the hardware it’s running on.
And what if you’re playing it on a PC that doesn’t have a card capable of hardware-based ray tracing? In those cases, the game is instead going to resort to a software ray tracing solution. While Stefanov didn’t go into what exactly the performance data is going to be like in those cases, he did say that the software ray tracing calculations in the game are “surprisingly fast.”
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is due out next year for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Stadia.